The bathrooms in Chinatown's Portsmouth Square Park have been on the radar of Mayor Gavin Newsom who demanded that a custodian be fired and ordered the city staff to come up with a plan to keep them clean after a visit there recently. (stall in women's bathroom) Shelley Eades/The Chronicle No sales/mandatory credit photog Mags out.

Photo: Shelley Eades

The bathrooms in Chinatown's Portsmouth Square Park have been on...

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daly011_lm.JPG Event on 5/24/05 in San Francisco.
Ed Lee, the new Sf City Administrator, at the board of Supervisors. Liz Mangelsdorf / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

If you want to see how hard it is to keep San Francisco parks clean, look no farther than Portsmouth Square, the square-block headache in Chinatown where the bathroom won't stay fixed and trash piles up so high that even an irate Mayor Gavin Newsom recently found himself scooping up garbage.

"We know we need more gardeners. And we've had budget cuts for seven years. But this is a performance issue, and it's just not acceptable," Newsom said after heading down to the square and finding no maintenance worker on duty.

The little park at Kearney and Clay streets has long served as a social center and cardroom for elderly Chinese. It's also long been plagued by graffiti, litter, vandalism, scruffy shrubbery and even scruffier homeless folks hanging about, as well as health risks from leaking water fountains, plugged toilets and an occasional dead rat in the children's playground.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, whose North Beach district includes the park, complained: "We have spent a huge amount of money fixing that place up ... and it looks like hell."

And "it's not for a lack of me calling and whining about it," Peskin said.

Nor the mayor, either.

More than once, he said, he's taken bosses in the Recreation and Park Department to look at the carnage. "I've been promised, told, 'Don't worry about it, Mr. Mayor,' " Newsom said.

But nothing seems to get better.

We visited the park recently and found a custodian cleaning the bathroom and a gardener hosing down the pavement above the playground. Still, a stall in the men's room was caked with toilet paper and dirt clods, and water flowed incessantly in the tank.

Newsom made an impromptu trip to the park the other day after meeting in Chinatown with a couple of his supporters, and left seething. Word quickly shot around the park system that the mayor had called the Rec and Park brass, demanding that the Portsmouth custodian be canned and insisting that something be done once and for all to get the civic eyesore cleaned up.

Newsom told us that he hadn't called for anyone to be fired, but did concede that he was more than a little upset at what he found.

"There wasn't anyone there," Newsom said. "It was in the middle of the day, and I had been told there would be someone there -- and there wasn't.

"I started cleaning things up myself. I started looking at things in the bushes, and I said, 'I'll be here for a month!' "

Rec and Park officials say they're scrambling to come up with a solution, but that they keep hitting a wall of bureaucratic regulations.

They wanted to hire a couple of extra workers to staff the park in the late afternoon and evenings. But under city rules, hiring the workers meant hiring a supervisor as well, which they can't afford.

As for the maintenance worker the mayor may or may not have wanted fired, the department says it has no grounds to get rid of him. And even if his bosses did want to can him, the city's complicated disciplinary process would make it unlikely. (Not to mention that the custodian was on his regular day off when Newsom showed up, according to a co-worker.)

Rec and Park officials say their budget has been cut to the bone in recent years, and that they're so short-handed they could use an extra 31 custodians and 227 gardeners citywide, or about twice what they now have.

In the meantime, the mayor's office has put the squeeze on Chief Administrative Officer Ed Lee, urging him to get the Public Works Department -- which handles most of the city's custodial duties -- to lend a hand in keeping Portsmouth Square clean, at least temporarily.

But with monthly reports of toilet seats swiped from the restrooms and even people walking off with bags full of toilet paper, it may take more than extra scrubbing to keep the park in order.

And Portsmouth isn't the only sore spot in the city's park system.

"I could take you on a nasty bathroom tour of the city that would turn your stomach," said park spokeswoman Rose Marie Dennis. "You wouldn't believe some of the things people do in bathrooms. We can't police them all the time."

Tower trouble: We told you about the cost overruns in San Francisco's brand new, eco-friendly, $144 million Federal Building at Seventh and Mission streets. Now, some workers there are dubbing the place the "Tower of Torture."

First there was a woman who got stuck in the tower elevator for two hours. Another woman tells us that days later, she and nine co-workers got stuck in an annex elevator for 45 minutes -- with the fan shut off.

"By the time we were rescued, we were drenched in sweat and about to pass out," said the woman, who asked not to be identified for fear she'd get in trouble by talking without authorization.

As if that wasn't enough, the building has so much natural lighting -- one of its heralded architectural achievements -- that some workers have resorted to wearing sunglasses and keeping sun umbrellas at their desks.

General Services Administration spokeswoman Gene Gibson says the elevators were tested before the building opened, and they are still going through "performance adjustments" -- but, yes, one glitch was discovered.

The elevator panic buttons, connecting to an emergency call center in Denver, didn't register the proper San Francisco address -- hence a delay in answering any calls for help.

"It took a couple of hours to figure it out, but those are all fixed now," Gibson said.

As for the really bright natural light, Gibson says the building's managers are looking at ordering reflective window shades.

Whenever a big new building opens, there's always a bit of tweaking needed to make everything work, Gibson said. She noted that only about 650 of the building's planned 1,600 workers have moved in so far.

The good news is that the smashed-out glass front door that workers discovered the other morning as they arrived at their high-security headquarters wasn't the work of vandals or other intruders. Seems equipment-wielding construction workers who are putting the final touches on the 18-story wonder accidentally smacked into the door.

EXTRA! Catch our Web page at www.SFGate.com/matierandross. Cast your vote on the fate of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Play the President Bush football handoff caption contest. Check out the bricks and kisses in feedback. And read the Extra, Extra, Extra musings and insights of friends including Rich "Big Vinny" Lieberman and The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci and Don "Bad Reporter" Asmussen.